I want to learn about aesthetics. is pic related any good and if not what should I read instead?

I want to learn about aesthetics. is pic related any good and if not what should I read instead?

very hard for beginners

Adorno is a very angry man, and his philosophy of aesthetics is absolutely atrocious. I recommend you read birth of tragedy or Hegel's lectures on aesthetics instead.

why is it atrocious?

Start with the fascists.

Adorno's pretty difficult. I would perhaps look into some secondary material in order to give you a grounding in the subject before you decide to tackle the Adorno's or Banjamin's.

Adorono makes the case against catharsis and against 'positive meaning' in art.

What he takes away from Hegel's notion of spirit as infinitely reflective is that life is never what we believe it to be. The meaning we might assign to the actions we take is already preeminently negated and transformed, so a piece of art with a satisfying resolution gives us a false sense of finality, of complacent satisfaction. For Adorno, it is our responsibility to negate ourselves in everything we do, including our consumption of art, so that we do not fall prey to false positivity – and for Adorno every positive is a false positive in a sense. There can be no true life within the false, and that means we should feel the pain of living in a false world in every waking moment of our existence.
Basically, the purpose of art is to eternally blueball yourself. I'm actually tempted to interpret it along the lines of: Adorno can't stand art which celebrates the becoming, ever-transforming meaning of life because somewhere in the depths of his soul he holds a worldview in which God is the eternal unchanging absolute, infinitely distant from our human perspective, and that absence of god in our world is something sinful, or even sin itself. I know someone's going to jump on me with antisemitism accusations for this, but it's more of a critique of the Jewish ontology than anything else.

Compared to that, Nietzsche praises art for its ability to create the 'Sun-eye of Apollo', which illuminates the world through its own illusion. Hegel does the opposite and says that the idea of 'becoming' is already pointing toward the absolute, and redeemed by that connection. This is roughly the position I would take as well. We're infinitely distant from Truth, but we're still in direct contact with it in our striving toward understanding, so it's perfectly alright to celebrate even a small truth we have reached, knowing that it will prove to have been just one stage of an infinite process of comprehension in due time.

>Adorno can't stand art which celebrates the becoming, ever-transforming meaning of life because somewhere in the depths of his soul he holds a worldview in which God is the eternal unchanging absolute, infinitely distant from our human perspective, and that absence of god in our world is something sinful, or even sin itself.
I think it may have something to do with the holocaust more than anything.

>Oh no people liked something bad and bad things happened the only way to prevent this kind of tragedy in the future is to never let them like anything again
No matter how you try to justify the position Adorno arrived at, it's still utterly pathological.

I wasn't trying to justify him. But it is understandable that his whole outlook on life took those characteristics.

Thing is, you also have people like Michael Ende and Stefan Zweig who dealt with the realities of WW2 and the horrors of the modern age in a compassionate, transformative way, despite all of the hardships they had to face thanks to it. I feel like Adorno simply used 'muh holocaust' as an easy justification for his elitism and irrational hatred of popculture.
>damn bugmen, stop liking things! you're literally hitler!

Just so we're in the clear, how would you define yourself politically?

But Adorno was deeply affected by the Holocaust, even going as far as saying that art itself is impossible after his tribe's summer camp adventure. But somewhere it feels like he just uses this as a justification for his endless pessimism and his endless critique of everything, as he himself knows that only a Utopia is really the way out of all this, and that is never going to happen.

Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse were generally snobs and limp-wristed reactionaries. Try reading "Eclipse of Reason" and taking a drink every time he uses the phrase "average man". You'll be drunk before the end of the first chapter.

this is an endgame text. you won't understand it for a long time (trust me, I didn't either).
Art Since 1900 is a standard primer for contemporary aesthetics and art theory. of course if you're really interested in aesthetics you need to read Kant, Hegel and the other big names

>contemporary aesthetics and art theory

What else can I read without Hegel and Kant?
I plan to get to them eventually.

you could try reading Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss and some of the other big names of contemporary art theory (their influence is pervasive to the point where one could call International Art English the style of art writing deriving from their work), but they really do demand a working knowledge of post-structural jargon and ability to penetrate often opaque prose. Jameson's Postmodernism has a reputation for being difficult but I think as far as texts on the subject go it is fairly accessible and will give you a good understanding of the trajectory of art in the past few decades. if you want a more readable primer, Arthur C. Danto ("What Art Is") is a good one to check out. you will also want to read Clement Greenberg at some point to grasp what modernist painting was about

I'm not going to just slap a label on myself, so here's a short overview. I believe society should be organized in such a way as to allow the individual to actualize themselves. Progress and tradition, open and closed borders, freedom and responsibility are all sides of the same coin, and need to be balanced against each other optimally to that end. There are situations in which I would support affirmative action, mostly in terms of giving financially and culturally disadvantaged individuals (which is to say, people who grew up in slums with most of their buddies being fuck-up druggies) a fair shot at turning their lives around and changing their communities from within, but immigration should for the most part be mutually culturally and economically beneficial, unless the population of a country decides to let strangers into their land for refuge out of compassion. Compassion which is imposed upon a population at their expanse is just a form of coercion, and you're creating more problems than you are solving by creating a situation where antagonism thrives.

Islam is not much worse than medieval Christianity, but it isn't reformable, because unlike Jesus, who actually saw himself as a servant of the divine and whose doctrine was reflective of his genuine philosophical thoughts, Mohamed was just a Warmonger who used religion as a tool to achieve his political ends, which means that unlike Christian priests, the Islamic rabbis didn't need to twist his words to turn it into a totalitarian ideology. I don't see individual Muslims as enemies of the free world because of this though. I actually know a guy who turned his back on Islam, which meant isolating himself from his family, and never being able to return to his home country because he'd be fucking murdered on the spot. That's just not a step you can expect most people to take. They'll just keep living according to tradition, imprisoning themselves and each other within their ideology. No one is at fault, and at the same time everyone is.

even worse, I believe in German it's 'gewöhnlicher Mensch' which translates to something between complacent, ordinary, average and mediocre.

. You could always read Jung if you want a cool perspective on art that doesn't require you to know much about philosophy.

Gombrich's The Story of Art is a great introduction to understanding the development of western styles, but doesn't really discuss aesthetics as a concept.

Berger's Way of Seeing is great for introducing the really simple idea of perspective, and can be read without prior experience.

Some of Adorno's shorter essays, like his twenty page thesis on Kafka, isn't all that un-impenetrable if you really had your heart set on him.

also there are a couple different collections of Nietzsche's aphorisms, with chapters arranged by subject

I read all of this and appreciate the effort. Is there a board where everyone posts in such long form?

Yeah, you can check out the library, a lot of people wrote these long chunks of texts and now their works are available in a sort of warehouse of thoughts from all ages and cultures.

You can't get a reply from a book, though.

But you havent really explained why Adorno is atrocious, only that you find his intense pessimism distasteful

Yes you can

How's that?

Just read books you nigger

Fuck that, I prefer talking to people

Incidentally books are written by people so it's like a conversation

It's exactly not like a conversation because it's one way and you can't ask for clarification by raising your eyebrows. Books force you to conform to the authors mode of thinking and if you find something disagreeable you're forced to live with it. Antiquated, unpreferred medium according to my calculations.

If the books you're reading don't pose questions and give answers maybe you should switch from shitty children's stories to some quality nonfiction.

>distasteful
disadvantageous

>it's like a conversation
platolaughing.jpg

Any recommendations?

>Pls rec me with gud nonfiction even tho i giff no subject and have no interests liek ever ok?
Lel

You gotta pay closer attention to the implications of what Adrono is arguing for. His position paints life itself as immoral and therefore sides against artistic freedom and liberation, an attitude which is utterly nihilistic in the Nietzschean sense. Telling people that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, arguing that they're like bugs drawn to the fire of illusory salvation, and that unless they turn their own existence into a constant act of self-torture, they are like the Nazis, is just about the most reprehensible intellectual sleight of hand I've ever seen, though to be honest I think that Adorno himself wasn't really aware of what he was saying.

form is the necessary limit which is art's condition of existence you dipshit. applying your bullshit liberal morality to philosophy reveals your ignorance, a sadly typical american trope

Actually, I'm a German Hegelfag, so fuck you.

>tfw someone writes a poem post-1945

feels like another shoah

It's so sad and pathetic how Germany has swallowed American intellectual culture. Forget the arabs, this is the real cuckoldry

>no Aristotle
>no Longinus

pic highly related

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It's so sad and pathetic how /pol/ has corrupted Americans so much that they're not ready to admit their mistakes or talk like an adult.

You assumed he was American and are now justifying it by saying some declarative crap. SHAME ON YOU AND YOUR MOM.

>What else can I read without Hegel and Kant?

In both cases you can just read their aesthetics independently of their other work. You can really do this with most philosophers who've written about the subject.

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